THE FROCKS AND THE BRASS HATS - PART THREE
THE FROCKS AND THE BRASS HATS – PART THREE
In The Frocks and the Brass Hats Parts One and Two I looked at civil military relations in the two world wars, but what about before and after? There has always been, and always will be, a conflict between defence and foreign policy, designed to keep the nation safe and great, and lower taxes, designed to keep the population contented and prosperous.
In 1658 the Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell lay dying of pneumonia in his sixtieth year. Cromwell had pacified the nation after the ravages of the Civil Wars, had established law and order in Scotland and Ireland, and had pursued a foreign policy that made England a real power in Europe and that was popular at home. All was not well, however. For most of the previous three years Cromwell had done what he took up arms against the king for doing, and ruled without Parliament. Not for the last time the economy was in dire straits and the rudimentary banks were refusing to make loans to the government, and, worst of all, the succession was unclear.
Parliament had dithered between making the succession elective or hereditary and had finally offered the Protector the crown, with the right to nominate his own successor. Cromwell, seeing the strength of the opposition towards his taking the kingship, had declined the throne, but accepted the right to decide who should govern England after him. The Cromwellian propaganda – not least that wonderful film with Richard Harris in the starring role – makes much of Cromwell’s spurning of the offer of the crown, supposedly on moral and religious grounds. Nonsense. Cromwell would have loved to be king, and only reluctantly turned it down, making a virtue of necessity the while, when he realised just how strong the opposition was, including that from the army and his own family.
The man whom Cromwell should have nominated as his successor as Lord Protector was Major General John Lambert, not only a highly accomplished soldier but a very competent administrator as well, and at the age of 41 fit and vigorous. However, Lambert had been one of those most opposed to Cromwell becoming king, and Cromwell had stripped him of all his offices, whereupon Lambert retired to Wimbledon where he spent most of his time cultivating his flower garden. Had Cromwell nominated him we would probably still be a republic to this day, but instead, only a few days before his death, Cromwell nominated his eldest son, Richard.
Now the trouble with Tumbledown Dick was that, firstly, he didn’t want the job, and secondly, he wasn’t capable of doing the job, and thirdly, he was massively in debt, as indeed was the country. Richard was unable to reconcile the opposing factions in parliament and the army, nor could he get the economy back on its feet, and for a time it looked as if his ineffectual rule would dissolve into anarchy with the extreme republicans on the one hand and unreconstructed divine-right-of-kings royalists on the other. Enter General Monck. Monck was the nearest thing to a professional soldier that existed in the England of the mid-17th Century. Originally in the Dutch service he had fought for the king in the First Civil War before being captured by Parliament in 1644. Two years in the tower persuaded him to change his allegiance and he became one of Parliament’s best generals, eventually becoming Cromwell’s deputy and commander of the army in Scotland. On Richard’s accession as Lord Protector Monck announced his support, but as the chaos caused by lack of firm government worsened, and as he received approaches from closet royalists, Monck became convinced that what was needed was a return to monarchy, but a monarchy moderated by Parliament. On new year’s day 1660 Monck marched his army south from its camp at Coldstream – his own regiment later becoming the Coldstream Guards – brushed aside a last attempt to defend the republic by General Lambert, recalled after Cromwell’s death, packed parliament with pro royalist MPs previously dismissed, and intimidated that body into voting to invite Charles II to resume the throne.
Moving on half a century, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, was the epitome of the political soldier. From a family of minor gentry who had lost all after fighting on the royalist side in the Civil Wars, he was befriended by the Duke of York, later James II. Initially a mere page to the Duke, Churchill was found an ensigncy by James who continued to support him, advance him, and line his pockets until he became a lieutenant general and one of the then King James’s most senior military advisers. Despite owing everything to James, Churchill deserted his patron in his hour of need and intrigued with Dutch William to dethrone James in what became known as the glorious Revolution of 1688. Of course it wasn’t that James was a Catholic that worried people – the country would have tolerated that given that both his heir and the next in line after that – his two daughters – were Protestant. What got the James the sack was his production of a son in 1688, by his second wife, Mary of Modena, whose dowry had been paid by the French king, thus presaging a Catholic – and hence foreign dominated – succession. The undoubted fact that John Churchill, later the First Duke of Marlborough, was one of our greatest military commanders cannot wipe out a shocking example of disloyalty and betrayal of the man to whom he owed everything. Of course he said that he did it to protect the Protestant religion. In fact can we really doubt that he saw which way the wind was blowing and jumped ship to make sure that he was on the winning side? That he corresponded secretly with James in exile would indicate that he would have been quite prepared to change his coat again if he had seen personal advantage in it.
While Cromwell had tried to prevent military officers from sitting in Parliament, that changed with the restoration and men like John Moore, Arthur Wesley, and Stapleton Cotton all held parliamentary seats while continuing to soldier. The Master General of the Ordnance, a serving officer responsible for the artillery, the engineers and certain aspects of supply, sat in the Cabinet as the government’s chief military adviser until as late as 1855. That it was the MGO who advised, rather than the commander in chief was a peculiarity of the system of checks and balances that had evolved to make a military coup impossible, and which in fact made any operation of war almost impossible.
General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon was in all probability barking mad, but he did have a talent for transforming various Chinese and Egyptian rag tag and bobtail into half way decent soldiers. He spent his entire career alternately mapping remote parts of the world, studying the scriptures, commanding outlandish expeditions, and falling out with his superiors and resigning. I think he resigned in fits of pique four times.
Eventually in 1888 he got himself appointed as governor general of the Sudan with instructions to evacuate Europeans and Egyptians in the teeth of the Dervish rebellion. Instead of doing what he had been told to do and then withdrawing in good order, he decided to pacify the province. His private agenda was to put down slavery in the Sudan – a perfectly laudable objective no doubt, but none of his business. He unashamedly manipulated the press and public opinion in England, stayed on in Khartoum when he could easily have got out, and when he was finally surrounded and killed – which is probably what he wanted – Gladstone’s government got frightful stick from the middle classes, particularly from those of the muscular Christian tendency.
In 1899 George Nathanial Curzon was appointed Governor General, or Viceroy, of India. Brilliant, arrogant, incisive, inflexible, with a usually justified very high opinion of his own abilities, he worked tirelessly not only to advance the cause of the Raj in India but for the good of the inhabitants as well. In 1902 he got as his Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India (the Indian Army and the British army units stationed there) General Viscount Kitchener, the public’s hero of the Boer War. Kitchener was determined to transform the Indian Army from what was almost a local gendarmerie into a modern army that could serve anywhere. He directed a massive reorganisation, founded the Indian staff college and accelerated the process of manning the army almost exclusively from what were considered the Martial Races – mainly Punjabi Mussalmans, Rajputs, Sikhs, Dogras, Mahrattas, Jats and Gurkhas. It was in the course of these undoubtedly necessary and beneficial reforms that Kitchener fell out with Curzon. Since the time of the East India Company military advice to the Governor General was provided by the Military Member of the Governor’s council. This person was either of the Indian, rather than the British, Army or a British army officer with long experience of India. The difficulty, in Kitchener’s eyes, was that the military member’s advice was independent of the Commander-in-Chief and the Military Member was a major general, whereas the Commander-in-Chief was a full general. Kitchener’s objections seem perfectly proper to us today, after all the sole source of military advice now to the Cabinet is the Chief of Defence Staff – if they bother to listen to him, that is – but from Curzon’s point of view two sources of advice were better than one. Both protagonists made the issue a point of principle, both appealed to their patrons in the UK, both intrigued against the other and both eventually offered their resignations. The government considered that it was easier to find another viceroy than lose the first soldier of the Empire, and it was Curzon who went.
And what of today? Much fuss and feathers have been generated in recent years by statements by retired and serving senior officers, who are accused of straying into the political arena and by behaving in an unconstitutional manner. But have they? General Sir Mike Jackson was very careful when in office as CGS never to publicly criticise government policy, although he did a great deal behind the scenes to defend the army from the predatory designs of the treasury. He has been accused by the media of all sorts of heinous crimes because he pushed through the re-organisation of the infantry and acquiesced in its reduction of the infantry by four battalions, and is thus castigated as a lap dog of the politicians. Now the way our infantry is organised is a subject on its own, which I would be delighted to write about had I the time, but suffice it to say that what Jackson did – transform a host of inflexible and unnecessarily expensive single battalion regiments into multi battalion regiments able to cope structurally with the requirements of modern war, and to replace the arms plot by trickle posting – was absolutely right. It should have been done in the 1950s but wasn’t because of heart attacks in the shires and opposition from what are often referred to as the old and bold, but are in my experience more likely to be the middle aged and timid. Now if you abolish the arms plot – and its existence effectively meant that at any one time 20% of the infantry was not available for operations – then logically you cannot argue with those who point out that a reduction of four battalions still leaves you with the same number of available battalions that you had under arms plotting. Here of course the Generals rather started to intrigue against each other, lobbying politicians for their own particular regiments, and one remembers the picture that appeared in every national newspaper of a small boy carrying a placard which said ‘I want to join my granddad’s regiment’. The facts are, of course, that he won’t – that particular division was the worst recruited in the infantry and had been for many years. Another CGS, General Sir Richard Dannat, caused an international uproar when he said, rather modestly I thought, that the planning for the post war fighting phase in Iraq hadn’t been properly thought out. Nobody – least of all ministers – could disagree with that. Major General (later General sir) Richard Shirreff, who was commanding the multinational, effectively British, division in southern Iraq said that the treatment of wounded soldiers evacuated to the NHS in UK was disgraceful and how right he was. I saw it – it was beginning when I was serving and it is disgraceful because successive governments both labour and conservative, destroyed the Royal Army Medical Corps and closed all military hospitals to save money. I must – reluctantly – accept that the current size of the armed forces cannot justify a dedicated hospital, but what is wanted and needed is a series of military wards – manned by and exclusively for servicemen – in NHS hospitals.
General Sir David Richards, CDS 2010 to 2013, told Cameron that the only way to sort out Afghanistan was to run it as a colony for 50 years. No government would spend money or time to do it. Gen Peter Wall, CGS 2010 to 2014, was persuaded to announce publicly that he was against leaving the EU. Most recently General Sir Patrick Sanders said in a letter to senior commanders that the British Army must now train to fight in Europe. The letter was leaked (deliberately?) and must have caused the ordering of many new pairs of trousers in Whitehall.
Now, should soldiers make public statements which impinge on the political? Well, as I have tried to show, they always have. Should politicians poke their noses into the military conduct of a campaign? Well, they always will. Soldiers, I fear, have to make their voices heard because if they don’t then nothing will be done. Except perhaps in wartime, when it is already too late, there are no votes in defence. In a democracy the first duty of a politician is to stay in power, and that means bribing a largely ignorant and greedy electorate. The money to do that can either come from taxation – rather self-defeating – or by redistribution – international business won’t stand for too much of that – or by taking money from somewhere else and hoping that the electorate won’t notice, or if they do notice don’t care. It is rather like not insuring your house and hoping that by the time it goes on fire you will have moved. Hence the British Army is at its smallest since 1818, all our married quarters are owned by the Japanese and we aren’t even the owners of our own staff college.